This blog comments on a variety of technology news, trends, and products and how they connect. I'm in Red Hat's cloud product strategy group in my day job although I cover a broader set of topics here. This is a personal blog; the opinions are mine alone.

Last Kodachrome roll processed in Parsons - "McCurry told Dwayne's vice president Grant Steinle how he had chosen to shoot the last roll of "Kodachrome produced by Eastman Kodak by capturing images around New York. "Then we went to India, where I photographed a tribe that is actually on the verge of extinction. It's actually disappearing, the same way as Kodachrome," he told Steinle."

Friday, July 23, 2010

Dead Tree Alert: Mad Men Returns; Plus, What Is a Spoiler? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The implicit request: thanks for all of your rave reviews of our show. We want you to write about the new season in advance. Preferably positively! But without any detail, quotation or concrete substantiation!
Uh, no. Criticism doesn't work that way. Journalism doesn't work that way--you don't just make assertions without evidence." << Sounds a lot like some NDAs.

NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer • Channel Register - "But Kemp also said that the scalability of the product and other issues with Eucalyptus (including the inability by NASA to get some of its enhancements into the Eucalyptus code base) compelled Kemp to take the entire Nebula team and dedicate it – for the past six months – to creating a new fabric controller, called Nova, from scratch."

The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com - "When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. " << My (mild) counterpoint to this meme is that the norm in history has been living where everyone knows your name (and your past).

Grey beards seize power at Big Blue • The Register - "In the moves announced yesterday, a number of independent IBM groups were consolidated, giving certain IBM executives more power and others less. Most of the executives who have increased power at Big Blue are not much younger than Palmisano, who turns 59 in July and is approaching the traditional 60 retirement age for IBM chairmen, so the reorganization is not meant to anoint a successor to Palmisano. If anything, it makes it pretty clear that there really isn't a successor to Palmisano and that the whole team may just stay together and keep working past retirement age."

NASA drops Ubuntu's Koala food for (real) open source • The Register - "NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders."

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Amazon Media Room: Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Hardcover Books - "Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher. " Striking given that my perception of the Kindle is that's it's somewhat of a niche device. Of course, Amazon is hardly the only source of hardcovers but still...

‘I’m Going to Go Call Ralph and Yell at Him.’ - "For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”"

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The 'false cloud' is false | Apps Meet Ops - CNET News - "If cloud computing is going to mean something practical, important, and central to enterprise IT over the next few years, cloud must be broad enough to include privately-owned and operated infrastructure. Cloud's benefits must be accessible to enterprise apps. That will often mean implementing the benefits with heavier performance, availability, and other guarantees than available in today's version 1.x cloud environments."

Hacker News | Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications - Interesting article and comments about the difference between what Google does and what good social does--even if it is overloaded with various mixed metaphors. I think it's also hard to dispute that Google doesn't even use social to augment search especially (except to the degree that Page Rank has an inherent social element). The comments on HN are as interesting as the original article.

Microsoft Rank And File Felt "Embarrassment All Over Campus" From Kin Failure - "We had a huge launch party on campus and I bet that party cost more than the amount of revenues we took in on the product. As an employee, I am embarrassed. As a shareholder, I am pissed. It's one thing to incubate products and bring them to a proof-of-concept to see what works, but it's something else to launch."

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

The knowledge factor in Silicon Valley - O Say Can You See? - "Terman’s goal was to import the Cambridge-MIT model of regional innovation to the West Coast. For Terman, marrying the knowledge of the university to the practical concerns of industry was critical to the formation of a self-sustaining high-technology and knowledge region."

OpenOffice at the crossroads - The H Open Source: News and Features - Without really disagreeing with much of what Michael Meeks has to say, there's also the matter of "Who pays?" Lots of people like having a free alternative to Microsoft Office, but there aren't companies out there with the self-interest and the money to fund the level of development needed for OpenOffice to shine.

About Me

I'm technology evangelist for Red Hat, the leading provider of commercial open source software. I'm a frequent speaker at customer and industry events. I also write extensively on and develop strategy for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio.

Prior to Red Hat, as an IT industry analyst, I wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies. Among other hobbies, I do a lot of photography and enjoy the outdoors.